An employee referral program simply cannot succeed if you can’t motivate your team to participate. You need their connections, their relationships, their interest.

Sure, a reward of a decent sum will probably grab their attention, but why stop there? Why not make your ERP everything you can, and really get your company’s attention?

That’s what we are here to help with, building a program that ensures results and brings in many new/fully vetted hires for your business. The following are tips to make sure you succeed.

Get Their Participation With Rewards

Rewards of money often aren’t enough. Why? Well, if you are an adult (and we all are) you’ll probably use the money to pay bills, and while that’s great because bills need to be paid, it’s a lot more fun to win an experience, or item we’ve been wanting.

Be creative about your rewards, change them up, offer new tech items like an Apple Watch, iPad, or iTunes card. Give away Amazon gift cards, or a trip to a local resort. This post talks about several ways employees find incentives at work.

Get feedback from your employees about what rewards would encourage them to participate more. You can send out an email to the company and ask them to fill out a survey.

Offer Recognition

Amazingly people don’t always care about rewards, but they like being recognized. You can give away regular rewards for participation but you could also do a public/company event to show off your gratitude by recognizing those who have helped bring in more talent.

Give away desk plaques or beer steins engraved with “Most Well Connected” or “Star Recruiter”. The more you can do to show employees how appreciated their efforts are, the more likely they will be to take the initiative seriously and look for recruits.

Check out this post that talks about the motivation from recognition of employees.

Get Everyone On Board

When something is part of the company culture, meaning it is engrained in how your company runs, employees understand the importance and add their own eagerness to the value.

This is where it’s time to get managers, the C-suite, and other executives on board. They need to regularly ask their teams about bringing in recruits. You can help them by reminding them often to do this. You’ll have to be crafty with email newsletters, but personal emails, too. Simply write them and say, Hey Bill, we need more recruits for your department, is there anyone you can nudge to ask around? Do you know anyone looking for XYZ position?

Otherwise, people forget to participate. They get caught up in their monthly focus, quarterly goals, etc, and look at recruiting as one of those things they can ‘get to someday’. But it’s your job to help them get over that hurdle and start asking about recruiting today.

Prove How Easy It Is to Participate

When you do get a few employees interesting in recruiting through your program, give them the star treatment. They are your evangelists that will go out and tell all of their friends in their departments how easy it is to bring in new talent. They are also the ones who will say how slow you are to give out rewards, how long it takes for the hire to be contacted, and how well they are treated.

It will take a lot of effort on your part to make sure employees are heard and their concerns are handled ASAP when you are first building the ERP. But anyone who participates will be a catalyst for pushing the program further into the culture, so take every opportunity to make sure it’s effortless, timely, and enjoyable for everyone involved. To see how important aspect is to your ERP, read this post on Recruiter.com

You can do this by:

• Responding quickly to inquiries, applications, and phone calls
• Scheduling interviews within days
• Staying on top of departments to share feedback
• Notifying everyone involved with an automated system
• Giving out rewards quickly
• Keeping everyone aware of what to expect

How you embrace, handle, and plan out your ERP is going to be the most important aspect of how well it is adopted. You can encourage others, and make this work, or you can throw it together and just hope (though this is very unlikely to result in success), it’s up to you. We are here to help you be successful, feel free to ask questions by contacting us, and we’ll get back to you right away!